


As the Handmaid had Foretold: a Tragicomedy in Three Acts

by bramblePatch



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Mythology/Religion, Alternian Circus Culture, Alternian Empire, Ancestral Anthology, Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, Gen, did you know: clowns never shut the hell up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 22:12:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4496673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Kurloz Makara, and you were hatched in the earliest days of the Alternian Empire, and you have a very, very long life ahead of you. Assuming the Handmaid of Death doesn't get fed up and shank you first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. To the Harlequin, Gabriel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ttnt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ttnt/gifts).



You were six sweeps old - almost six sweeps - closer to six sweeps than to five - when you first encountered the Handmaid of Death.

All trolls that age are little idiots, whether or not they manage to survive to grow out of it, and you were no exception. It was the middle of a dim season, sky streaked with mild light and rich color most of the night, and the old goat had just left the beach again, and you had taken it into your fool head to try and follow him. Not into the water, you weren't that suicidally daring, but you'd watched him go enough times before to know that he almost always went off parallel to the shoreline, at least as far as you could see from your hive. So maybe, you reasoned, you'd be able to follow along on the headland and find where he went when he wasn't looking after your scrawny ass and maybe then you could stay there and he wouldn't have to go off anywhere.

(Sweeps later, you'd learn enough of seagoat habits to know that even had you been able to keep up, it would have been a fool's errand. Your lusus likely swam hundreds or thousands of miles between visits to your hive, and much of that through open ocean. There was no hidden refuge to find. It was probably a wonder that the old goat had come back as often as he had.)

But though dim season nights are long, they aren't indefinite. You spent the first day crouching the back of a low, rocky cave on the shore, wondering if the light or a high tide was going to get to you first. You spent the second day hiding in a boathouse down the beach from a hive that did not look nearly deserted enough for your comfort, cool and dark and dry but too nervous to get any real sleep. And in the pre-dawn chill of the third morning, as you were starting to get worried and upset, bone-weary and beginning to realize this whole plot was a monumentally stupid idea from the start, you came across a grown woman sitting cross-legged on a boulder next to the sea.

You were more or less of a size then, the two of you, though the hard lines of her face and the great curves of her horns left no doubt that she was many sweeps your senior, and when she turned to look at you, the shifting colors of her eyes showed her to be something other than truly troll.

And the Demoness spoke unto you, and she said, "Kurloz. What's a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?"

You stood and stared at her for a long moment, unable to quite parse her greeting.

She sighed, and slipped down from her perch, almost impossibly light in her landing. "It was a joke, kid, don't sweat it. Well, come on, if you've gotten yourself lost all the way out here you'd better come with me," she said - impatient, long-suffering. 

It would be nice to be able to say that it was because of the flickering power that limned her skin and horns, or because you knew of her from stories and whispers and knew her business, that you drew back as she reached for you, but in all truth you were a small boy and wary of adults, whatever else they might be, and it was nothing but mundane nervousness that sent you scrambling back across the beach away from her with a yelp.

"I ain't lost!" you snapped, finally finding your voice. "I'mma find my lusus, I'm not lost."

"...Kurloz. You're being an idiot," she said softly, after a long moment; and this was, you will later realize, the _gentlest_ thing the Handmaid would _ever_ say to you. "He doesn't give a fuck about you."

"Does too!" you yelled at her; as scared as you were, the insult to your lusus and to you made you angrier. You were old enough to know she was right, though, for all you protested. "He's at being busy, is all! He's my lusus and he loves me."

She reached for you again, caught you this time, a thin hard hand around your wrist and try as you might you could not pull away from her grip. "You've never been loved, you little ass," she snapped, drawing her face far too close to your own for comfort. Her eyes made your head hurt and you looked at her mouth instead; blunt even teeth, like the basalt pillars of the seaside cliffs. "And if you don't come with me now, you're going to _die_ burning and unloved on this beach."

"And what else?" you demanded, a little surprised at your own nerve, a little resigned to the fact that whatever was in motion was in motion and you really had very little else to lose. Perhaps the lack of sleep in the past few days had left you loopy and bold. Perhaps you were just, as she said, an idiot and an ass. "What'cha gonna do, you? You gonna be the one what loves me? What's you got to do with it?"

She seemed a little taken aback; her hand tightened on your wrist, and the flickering light that surrounded her intensified just a little. Where it glinted against your skin, it felt powerful, and wonderful, and unclean.

And then she turned on her heel and started climbing through the dunes and the hills and into the scrubland, dragging your sorry ass along with her, refusing to say more, though you shouted and whined and demanded. You could have found a place to spend the day on the shore, you thought; she was going to leave you to die lost in the hills when the sun rose, you thought. It could not be much longer now; the sky in the east was streaked and dappled with angry orange and no-color gray and the sun could not be far behind.

But then - you crested a hill, her pace still as aggressive as ever, so fast for such a small troll, you still scrambling to keep up and not be dragged through the brush on your ass, and suddenly the shallow valley below was full of heavy canvas tents, pitched like some strange striped fungus. You were too confused to be relieved, as she strode into the middle of the camp with you in tow. Even with morning looming, there were trolls about, more than you'd ever seen in one place at one time. Trolls in clothing that looked outlandish to your sheltered eye, trolls whose expressions were hard to read behind masks of paint, or who wore no paint on their faces but braided bright ribbons and bits of bone into their hair and around their horns. Adults in their prime and adolescents not much older than you, trolls who wore a great deal of color or whose blood was evident only in their eyes.

And ever single pair of eyes on the two of you.

She dragged you to the largest tent, in the middle of the camp, to the adult - indigo like you, you noticed, you'd never seen another indigo in the flesh - who wore the most elaborate regalia, and she shoved you toward him with enough force to make you stumble into the dust.

"This one has potential, and he needs to be taught. He's your headache now," she said, and vanished in a maelstrom of light that made the back of your throat hurt.

There was a long moment of stunned silence, and then the troll - the Comedian, you would learn to call him - dropped into an easy squat, studying you. "What d'you think, boy, _are_ you a headache?"

"No?" you hazarded, though you suspected you were.

And he laughed, and looked around at the troupe that still gathered between the tents and stared. "Alright, folks, morn's coming. Don't hang 'round gawking, you'll all have plenty of time to get familiar with our headache later."

 

A perigee later, the circus passed very near your hive, and you were given permission to go retrieve such things as you wanted to carry with you on the road. You burned down the rest. Perhaps your lusus returned the following season. You didn't know, and you told yourself you didn't care, because the Handmaid was right: he hadn't loved you. You'd been stupid to think he had.

 

Sweeps passed, and you grew, and for these sweeps you grew as happy as any troll manages. You learned the way of the clown and you came to wear the paint. The circus was not much welcome in most civilized parts, but you were never very civilized anyway, and you couldn't much say you cared. What you cared about was that you were valued; you were made much of, little mystic, little dream-weaver, miracle child delivered to them by the Handmaid herself.

And yes, headache. You never shook that name, but they meant it kindly, you thought. An endearment, and a benediction of the Demoness. And you could take a joke, take it and run with it and make it your own joke, and so when you were grown - or at least more grown than you'd been when you left your hive and joined the circus - you took Headache as your title.

 

The troupe you ran with now was much larger than it was when you'd joined them as a child; it was hardly even fair to call it a circus anymore, though it pained you to see the group sacrifice theatrics for security. But the world was not safe for travelers - not that it had ever been, not that it was safe for anyone, but tensions were high and you'd traveled further and further inland as the Sea-Queen reached out and took land as well, consolidating territory that previous empresses of the deep had never claimed. Most settlements were more suspicious of outsiders than ever before, for all that your people breathed air as exclusively as they did.

You banded together for security and for comfort, followers of the Messiahs and the Minstrels, and if you were not entirely sure why the others would look to the Demoness's Headache for guidance, you weren't complaining about it, either. As sweeps passed and as a caravan became a tribe became a nearly nation, as others who followed the way of the circus came together in dark times and swelled your ranks, you found you liked leadership, though you were not fond of the need to watch your back.

As much a warlord as a ringmaster, now, you were. And though so far your people had held their own, protected their own, kept the faith - you realized well enough that this could not go on forever. Not as the winds of the empire battered at Alternia's disparate hivecolonies. The circus you'd grown to love thrived best on the edges of things, between places, and there were fewer and fewer places between to be.

And one evening, you found the Handmaid in your tent, pouring over the papers that spilled across the table with a bored air.

"The fuck are you doing here," you said, rolling your neck a little to get the points of both horns past the doorway; it wasn't quite a question, wasn't quite a demand. You weren't sure what it was quite. Just wasn't quite.

She looked up as you walked over - well, it was your tent, and if she hadn't killed you when you were young and stupid you liked your chances now - and you were amazed to find how small she was. Even her horns, though still much bigger than your own, spiraled out nearly horizontal and afforded her no real extra height. She did not even come close to reaching your shoulder, a slight little thing. But suffused with strength that had nothing to do with her size, you knew that.

Whatever else the two of you were, you were a troll, and she was something else.

"Do you like running away?" she asked you. There was no real curiosity in her voice, and no outrage; there was precious little anything in her voice, and you wondered if you'd imagined her manner when you were a child.

"Got no revelation what you're getting at," you replied, just a little suspiciously; a fine one she is to speak of running away, when you'd seen no hide nor horn of her in sweeps.

"All the little hidey holes," she said, trailing a hand across a map; there was a scent of burned hair and you snatched the paper away from her, frowning absently at the little scorched trails her fingertips left. "You were so ready to go off to sea after your lusus, weren't you? And now there's a different monster rising and you want nothing to do with her."

Ah, and there it was, now you had a foothold on the conversation. "A monster she's to be, and a people I'm to have," you pointed out. "The motherfucking show must go the fuck on, Demoness."

She looked at you, sharp, sharp as you remembered her being. "You can't hide from her indefinitely; she'll find you. If you take your army against hers, she'll win, though you'll hurt her."

"And is that being in the way of council or prophecy?" you demanded.

The Demoness shrugged. "To heed prophecy is good council, isn't it?" she asked.

You glowered at her. "Not when the prophecy is for defeat, sister," you said. "Not when the prophecy is for the being of the end of being."

"You didn't let me finish," she said, and looked at you, as if waiting for another outburst. You didn't give her the satisfaction, beyond waving a hand irritably for her to go on, and she did. "If you join your force to hers, Alternia will fall to you both."

You considered for a moment, frowning still, but thoughtfully now. "Ain't heard any say that she's righteous," you said doubtfully, and the Handmaid of Death made a most undignified snort of disbelief.

"If the Lord only had use for those who already revere him, your adolescent bones would be bleaching on that beach, kiddo," she growled, and you gritted your teeth, unable to refute her words and unable to explain the extraordinary bitterness behind them. You had been godless, true, but innocent, no heretic; you had learned and embraced the faith with all the power behind each squeeze of your bloodpusher. What was there in your conversion to resent? What in your belief?

But you were unsure what, if anything, you were being accused of, and the Handmaid was one of the few people you knew who you could not now scare an answer out of; you had enough understanding and enough dignity and perhaps just enough of a touch of lingering adolescent uncertainty that you did not have any desire to try. And after a moment she added, "The tyrian's faith is not required, just her cooperation. Send an envoy."

And you had no opportunity to question the order, to ask for justification or clarification, because at that moment there was a rustle at the entrance of the tent, and the Handmaid flickered away in a maelstrom of horrible light that hurt your eyes and cast odd shadows across the face of the intruder, who squeaked and flinched, covering lime-green eyes.

It did you no harm to be known to consult with the Demoness, so you did your best to shake it off and grinned at the girl.


	2. To le Clown Blanc, Michael

The alliance worked. You had been unsure it was wise, and the Tyrian who styled herself _Her Imperious Condescension_ \- a name so self satisfied, it made you laugh, though mostly not where the Condesce could hear you - had been unsure of your sincerity, but you'd bickered and postured your way through negotiations. She'd had no call to the Messiahs, no desire for any god beside the monstrosity that had guarded her infancy. (You'd wondered, you would always wonder, when you were pensive or lonesome or when you particularly resented the empress, what it must be like to have a lusus who not only guarded you as a wiggler but even stayed at your side through adulthood?) But she was glad enough to reward service with legitimacy. She gave your people succor and received the circus's knowledge of the country and the people. She gave your people the freedom to worship as you would, and the circus folk gladly became her enforcers and spies and propagandists. 

And she made you, personally, her right hand troll, where she could make the greatest use of you and keep the closest eye on you, and you found that it was a comfortable position to occupy. Even if she did not think that _Headache_ was a proper title for her chief enforcer - she called you _Magister_ , and in time so did your people, and the people that the two of you conquered together.

For conquer you did; in time, all of Alternia came under her heel and your hand, as the Handmaid had foretold.

But no regime goes unchallenged forever.

 

The movement around the little scarlet mutant had grown quickly, from a band to a tribe to very nearly a nation, and had the circumstances been a little different, you would have set your agents among them, your clowns and mentalists and contortionists, and undermined the rebellion and led it to implode under its own weight, or brought it to a form that would have been useful to you and to the empress. You had done it before. If you were not so certain of the Demoness's nature and her loyalties, you might suspect that the same had been done to your own circus - or perhaps it was what the circus had done to the empire itself. The motives and loyalties of trolls were a little thing to manipulate, and so much littler when you could twist and pull the fears that were tangled up in them.

But your agents had a way of disappearing into the ranks of the Signless's followers - at first you had assumed that the enemy was discovering and culling the infiltrators. And in some cases perhaps they were, but the reports that the next round of spies sent out before they, too, went silent or fled back to their handlers, suggested a very different story. The cult of the Signless was not culling intruders, they were _converting_ them, tempting hard godless imperial trolls and strong devout circus folk to their heretical prophet and his words, and with remarkable success.

And though you were ever the commensurate dream-wright, though you generally could and often did sleep without a drop of sopor to dull the nightmares because you could bring them to bridle, you were losing sleep over this troll. Some of it was your own turmoil - some was the fact that you tried to reach out and disturb his sleep, his specifically, and the contact between your dreaming minds was more unsettling to you than it was to him, though on waking you could not entirely say why.

So finally, you resolved to take a hands-on approach, before the movement gained too much momentum to crush by brute force, before the rebels could become revolutionaries. It was not so hard as you had thought it might be - in their kindness, they were incautious. They were clever in concealing their movements from the Condesce's more overt forces, but made little secret of their movements among the common folk.

And now you very nearly had their ringleader - their ringmaster, their prophet, though perhaps not their general - cornered.

 

Some trolls under your command preferred to ride to the hunt, having the skill or the power to break a steed to their will or to command or commune with it, but it had been a very long time since you trusted a mere beast with your well being, assuming you could find one that would tolerate you, which you are not at all sure you could at that point. You were a beast of a troll yourself, the empress's Magister (the Demoness's Headache, to a very few, still) and if you were not more swift than a hoofbeast, you did not need to be.

You simply needed to be swifter than a rebel.

The ironic thing was, the ringleader himself was the weak link in the rebellion's command's ability to evade you; the psionic (Ψiioniic, he styled himself, and the absurdity of the way he'd contorted that word into a proper title would have made you laugh if he wasn't such a thorn in your side) could have easily outpaced you in the air, the rainbow drinker surely had the speed and stamina common to her condition, the little huntress was quick and nimble and knew this canyon-cut city terrain better than you did. But they'd been so focused on their leader's safety that your lieutenants had picked them off easily, and now you tracked the Signless yourself. The mutant was small and slow and for all his stubbornness he was clearly a mystic and not a militant, and he could not evade you forever.

Especially since he could duck down side-streets and under bridges and through water-cut paths in the rock to hide, but his fear was sharp on your thinkpan, bright as his blood, and you could not loose track of that.

You were nearly blinded by it, though, as his fear flared to panic and dismay that had nothing to do with you, and you careened around a corner to find him stopped in his tracks, and the Demoness looming between him and the end of the alleyway. There were few trolls that she could manage to loom over with both feet firmly on the ground, but he was one of them.

And there were few trolls who would react to her with anything other than blind terror, but past his first brief bright flare of panic, the no-caste rebel managed to fight down the worst of his fear - you'd hardly have believed it, but you'd been using your voodoos to track him a moment before and you were still all twisted about him, psychic-wise - and he actually took a step toward the Demoness, a name and a plea on his lips: "Damara, _please_ , let me past!"

She seemed as surprised as you by his words - flickering, untrollish eyes widening, slim fingers tightening around the needles in each hand. She looked... scared, almost, although you kept well clear of her mind as you didn't from his, unwilling to trespass on the territory of the higher powers that held her, and so you didn't know the taste of her fear first hand. 

Emboldened, perhaps, by the reaction, the rebel took another step toward her, still breathing hard from his flight, with both hands held out and open - a gesture of reassurance and surrender, of supplication. "None of this has to be like this, come _on_ , Damara, you know that."

In his appeal to the Demoness, he'd let his guard down from your direction, and before he could continue in that vein, you'd closed the ground between the two of you and seized him, one hand catching him by the throat and the other pulling his wrists behind him and forcing him down, a pin you could have accomplished in your sleep, on a troll as small as he. He yelled, and swore, and tried to kick out at you in a display of ineptitude that was frankly hilarious, and it took little enough of your attention to control him, now that he was in hand.

And under the weathered-stone arch at the mouth of the alleyway, the Demoness narrowed her eyes, and hissed, "That is not my fucking name," and flickered out of existence before you could ask what the hell the mutant had been talking about, why he had startled her so.

 

Well, you had _some_ recourse there, when your curiosity overcame your good sense; secret rituals, hidden rites, pieced together through circus lore and arcane tradition and your own disjointed, eldritch dreams. You'd never used them before, though you trusted enough in the revelations that had brought them to you that you were confident they'd work; you'd never felt enough of a pressing cause to demand the Demoness, the Handmaid of Death himself, to attend to you.

Perhaps you'd been overcautious before. Perhaps you were being incautious now. But with the rebel leader safely in custody and awaiting trial and sentencing and, inevitably, execution - the first two steps being mostly theatrics, as everyone involved were perfectly clear - you'd laid out the signs and the sacrifices, the cog of the universe and the unclean unnames and the blood of not-quite-innocents, and invoked with fire and song and chucklevoodoo.

And she'd appeared, disoriented and distraught, and the circles and cogs laid out on the floor had done nothing to contain her - they hadn't been meant to, although you'd lied and said they would, to enlist the cooperation of the young ceruleanblood who the Demoness cut down in the first fractions of a moment after being summoned - and within three breaths she was upon you, a needle at your throat, shimmering, shifting colors of light playing across her weapon and her skin and shifting through her eyes at such a rate and a pattern that it it made your own eyes hurt.

She could have killed you immediately, and she didn't, so after a long moment of patient fright, you pushed her away, the fingertips of the splayed hand you placed against her throat reaching easily from shoulder to shoulder. The light on her skin stung where it lapped against your hand, but you wondered that she'd ever seemed anything other than diminutive to you. Had you really ever found her horns imposing? They weren't so much greater in span than some mortals'. She stared at you, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, for a long moment, and if you had not known better you would have said she looked very young.

" _What_ ," she finally hissed.

"You'd be better telling _me_ what, sister-high," you growled back at her, regaining your confidence in the situation moment by moment; it was hard not to feel powerful, in your ceremonial finery and your most elaborate ritual paint. Hard not to feel in control, when beyond that first desperate lunge, the Demoness seemed unsure what she ought to be doing in the moment. "You had better be saying quick and clear what that _fucking_ rebel _creature_ thought he was to invoke sentiment-wise and contrary-ways in you."

"Why do you care?" she snapped, and you laughed, and spread your hands in a sweeping gesture, indicating - what? You weren't entirely sure. The room, the city; your magisterium and your species and your high rank and the ones higher.

"She asks why I care? How could I _not_ care, me where I balance?" you replied, half shouting, half laughing, the kind of mirth that was shot through with threat and fear. "Messiah on one shoulder, Messiah on the other, _motherfucking fish-bitch empress_ breathing down my back and needing to know I'm giving her allegiance what can't ever be undivided to her?"

"If the mutant's to being _important_ ," you continued, and now you dropped your voice, bent toward her, until you were too close for comfort and too much riding the awful high of confrontation with a thing like her to back off, "then I'll be needing to _know_ , sister."

She swallowed, and shook her head, strands of hair moving in ways that weren't quite explained by momentum or drafts of air. "He's not," she said, and you wished you dared thread a bit of voodoo into her pan, to know whether the words were accompanied by the fear that got tangled up in guilt at falsehood. "He's not important and you need to just _get rid of him_ already, asshole. Don't fuck around."

And she took a step backward, and another, until you had to let her go or take a step forward yourself.

"He had a name all for you," you pointed out. "A hatchling's name."

She shook her head again, almost desperately, the colored light coming thicker around her now. "He doesn't know me," she insisted. "He'll think he knows you, too, if you let him talk to you. Don't. He doesn't know what he thinks he knows. _Get rid of him_."

And before you could question further, the swarm of flickering colors had taken her away again, and you couldn't quite bring yourself to enact the summoning all over again. Not when you were not entirely sure you _weren't_ glad of the blessing to wash your hands of the whole thing.

 

You broke the rebellion, shattered it, but - the thing about things that have shattered is that it is very hard to find all the little shards. All you could do was be meticulous in cleaning up the mess, like the careful sweeping of a floor after dropping a glass tumbler, and trust that the longer you did not step on a nasty sliver of heresy the less likely it was that you were going to.

Sweeps spun into decades and decades spiraled into centuries, and your Empress trusted you and then she neglected you, leaving you to rule the planet in her name as she migrated outward and to the stars. You were not surprised by this development, really; you knew her well enough by then to know that her ambition was as much wanderlust as it was anything else. She'd taken the seas and then she'd explored the land and now that there was no part of Alternia that was forbidden to her, she turned her attention outward.

Your ambition, though, could not be served by outrunning everything you controlled, and you were happy enough to build your fairgrounds and your bigtop-cathedrals and sit in dominion over a planet that had once sent your circus-folk scattered and skittish into the odd corners of society.

You did not know what form the Handmaid's ambition took; you saw her rarely, and never at close hand, never more than a brief moment of acknowledgment from across a battlefield, or of annoyance, or of blank tired empty eye contact, and though it felt dangerously like blasphemy even to think it, you found you envied her less and less her lot.

In fact, you did not speak to her again until things went sour, and that thrice bedamned rouge cavalreaper had finally overreached himself - the freak with the wings and the attitude, one who had been so _entertaining_ right up until the point that you realized things had overbalanced and no one was coming out of this one unscathed. It had been as much your fault as anyone's, you knew; you had allowed yourself to be distracted, allowed yourself to humor him because his hubris amused you. And no matter how much of the blame was _rightfully_ yours, this little uprising had caught Her Imperious Condescension's notice and, coming back to the planet, she would hold you to as much or as little fault as she cared to. 

You were trying to figure out how to negotiate with the empress, when inevitably she returned to the planet; trying to determine exactly how many centuries of careful cooperation this would undo. Hoping that you would, between interrogating the prisoners and questioning your own agents, be able to figure out how the so-called Summoner had been able to not only rally the scattered cultists of the Signless, but had fallen in with a blueblood who had been present at the execution of that earlier rebel. You absolutely did not want to deal with the Handmaid at this juncture.

And yet here you found her, in your own private inner sanctum, sitting perched almost daintily atop your own private pile of skulls - which was mainly for show, anyway, who would _choose_ to sit in a pile that was, in no small part, horns and teeth? And many of those skulls were old and small and fragile enough you wouldn't trust your weight to the pile, either, although she was small enough that they'd barely shifted from the careful pyramid you'd built, beneath her. One skull sat cradled in her lap, her arms crossed over the cranium and fingers lingering on the horns; by the asymmetrical hooks of those horns, you know it was that of the Summoner's mercurial matesprit, the one he'd killed by his own hands and you'd salvaged the body of. You'd kind of intended to taunt him with her skull. It seemed almost in poor taste, now.

Did the Handmaid know whose head she held? You weren't willing to bet that she didn't, although you couldn't imagine what significance the Marquise would have had to her.

"The fuck do you want?" you snarled, stalking across the block toward her, in too foul a mood already to think much about what she was, what threat she could pose to you should she care to. Maybe it _was_ all coming crashing down, now; maybe it would be less ignominious to fall on her needles than to find it necessary to duel the empress, or fight your way past whatever forces she thought right to bring a failed governor to task.

She didn't look up, and when she spoke her words were small and soft, and that brought you up short more surely than any shout. "You're still holding Darkleer aren't you? And Skylance as well. You haven't put them to the club yet."

That she would use the personal names of the exiled Executor and the Summoner confused you, and your confusion angered you further; under better circumstances, you might have had the patience to tease through the riddles of her manner, but now you were tired and you were upset and you were facing a future that was a good deal less certain than it had been at any time since you had first risen in the circus ranks. You stood over her, loomed, and the act of being physically imposing in her general direction gave you no comfort.

"I will _get to that_ when I have done as fucking needs to be done to have all the intelligences they can be imparting my way," you snarled. "Do not _rush_ me, lady death. I know my part."

"Don't," she said, her voice cracking a little, "please, Highblood, don't."

It was a plea, not a command, and she sounded almost like any troll who might beg for mercy, and as such it unsettled you deeply. "Why the mirthforsaken _hell_ not?"

The handmaid looked up, suddenly, and in a split second before the usual colors spilled across the surfaces of her eyes, you could have sworn you saw mortal eyes, dark-on-gold, too quick to say for certain what color. "Because Darkleer can _hide_ us, Highblood, because the Lord cannot see through his void anymore than mortal psychics can, because any idiot can tell you'd rather fuck the Summoner than cull him, because you can be _better_ than our _fucking gods_ want you to be-"

You backhanded her, savagely, a strike across the face that sent her sprawling from the skull pile, small and light in her surprise. She began to rise; you crossed the floor between the two of you in a couple of paces, snatching up a club as you went; there was little thought involved here, nothing but blind outrage. Confusion, perhaps, that the Demoness herself would say such things, but the kind of confusion that only fueled the anger. Perhaps it focused you, having a target other than your own doubts. Perhaps it was simply a distraction from those guilty misgivings.

And she looked up at you through eyes that were properly clear now, clear brick red, and she spat maroon onto the floor at your feet. "Fucking do it," she gasped. "Maybe we're near enough to Darkleer that Scratch won't see. Maybe it'll work."

She sounded - tired, far more tired than you were. Desperate. And just a little hopeful. For the first time, you dared to concentrate on her, to invoke some small portion of the chucklevoodoo upon the Handmaid of Death.

You found nothing. No fear, no trepidation, no guilt or dread or any of the other emotions that tied inextricably into fear. Just a deep, deep undercurrent of despair that rose further with every second that she looked up at you with those lowblood eyes and you did not cull her.

With a growl of frustration, you flung away the club, not bothering to look where it fell though you could hear it rattling across the floor behind you, and you kicked her in the midsection, once, twice, thrice. Not hard enough to kill her, but enough that movement and breathing would be painful. You knew what you were doing, knew how much punishment even the most delicate of trolls could take and walk off, knew how to bring any troll to believe themselves dying when they were nothing of the kind as easily as you could kill them before they knew they'd been struck.

If it was death she wanted, death she would not get.

After a long moment of listening to her pained breath, you crouched down to her level, reached out and with the back of one finger, you turned her face to yours. "I thought you were craving me be _merciful_ , sister most low most exalted," you breathed. "Here's my mercy, for you and your blasphemy: if you go your own way and out of here, I'll not make you watch when the traitors are culled. Ain't that a kindness for you? Get the fuck out. I've justice to serve and an empress to handle."

You stood, turned on your heel and left the block, to angry and confused to watch and see her leave, but when next you returned to your quarters there was no sign of the Handmaid save for a smear of dark angry red on the floor, and trailing from it, words written in the same blood -

_SHE WILL N0T CALL F0R Y0UR BL00D, AND Y0U WILL WISH SHE HAD_

A curse, a threat, a prophecy, a promise? You had your things moved to a different respiteblock that night and tried not to think too hard about the reason for the change of venue.


	3. To the Contra-Auguste, Samael

Whatever her intent had been, the Demoness's bloody message to you has come true.

It has been centuries since you last set foot on the soil and the soul of Alternia. You were desperately homesick the first few decades, and you tried to hide it. Then you began to acclimate to the new transient way of life that all adults after you would follow, and you were not sure which condition made you more unhappy, the diaspora or the fact that you were becoming inured to it. You spend time on colony planets, and it does nothing to comfort you. The ships and space stations of the Alternian empire are still strange to you, a troll who spent so long on Alternia, but at least they are a novel kind of strange.

The empire has expanded beyond your wildest surmises, beyond the dreams of anyone save perhaps for the Condesce herself, whose avarice and restlessness seem as inexhaustible as they had been all those hundreds - thousands, now? - of sweeps ago when you had been little more than a boy and she, already grown, already old, had set to conquering the land.

And the circus endures, but once more your people are spread thin - out of fashion, hard-pressed to gather in any great numbers with the conflicting duties due to the empire, and the empress no longer so indulgent of your whims as she once was. You know that the circus endures, too, on Alternia, a children's crusade of a cult, even more mistrusted by their peers than their elders are in the fleet. Upon their ascension to adulthood, too many of them are too serious for their short sweeps, or prickly and defensive, or half-addled with denial and chemical comfort, and though many of them can be taught pride and wonder and joy, brought into the fold - there was a time when that indoctrination was not necessary, when they grew into it naturally. It pains you, remembering this.

Tonight, you are attending to business on a colony planet, walking through a city square that might almost have been a scene from Alternia of old, save for the color of the sky and the taste of the air and the fact that the trolls of the crowd only slightly outnumber the natives, a somewhat troll-like species which had been conquered easily and fully enough to keep for their expertise in the industries of their home planet. But even with the gabble of alien languages interspersed with proper Alternian, and the too-clear blue of the sky, and the scent of strange spices and stranger chemical fuels on the air, the bazaar you find yourself in is just about the right kind of lively to put you at ease.

Or, well, as much at ease as you ever are, now. It would help if the crowd did not part so quickly around you, but your pride can hardly allow you to admit as much; at least you are formidable enough that you can safely dispense with any sort of bodyguard. 

And in the crowd, you startle just a little as you spot a long-absent but long-familiar figure. From across the square, the Demoness smiles ever so slightly, and gestures for you to follow her before slipping away into the press of trolls and aliens.

They do not part for her the way they do for you, and you wonder if you've finally gone mad, if you're the only one who can see the impossibly broad spiraling horns and the ghostly shimmer of color across her skin. Eventually, though, you catch up, as she slips into the courtyard seating area of a shop selling small cups of a bitter, hot beverage. She takes a seat at a table in the back corner, and you follow; the chairs are far, far too small for a troll your size to use with any degree of dignity, and as she looks questioningly at you, you hesitate only a brief moment before sitting, cross-legged, on the tiled floor.

"Surprised to find you finding me, Demoness," you comment, cautious and curious. "After last time we fucking up and crossed ways through."

She looks at you for a long moment, her expression mild - and, you think, a bit confused, although it is a little hard to read her behind those colored lights that mask the maroon eyes you now know to be watching you. You wonder, suddenly, if she even remembers.

An alien boy, wearing what must be the uniform of the coffee house, brings a pair of drinks that you are certain you did not order, but the Handmaid nods to him and produces a couple of the ceramic tokens that pass for small denominations of currency on colony planets. The sum is small enough that you presume she has already paid for the drinks, and large enough that you wonder when and how and why she learned to tip so generously. The boy scurries off, and the Handmaid slides one of the cups across the table to you.

You don't touch it. She does not touch her own.

"What's this meeting so cordial met for?" you press, after a moment, unsure whether you are annoyed or intrigued.

She shrugs, answers, "You are about to die."

Once you would have jumped to your feet, brandished a weapon, roared a challenge at those words, but though a troll of your caste may outlive any who walks on the land and you have outlived most of your caste, age has left a stronger mark on your soul than it has on your body. You go stock-still where you sit, stoney behind your paint, and you regard her through narrowed eyes. "And you? You're here to cull the old bleatbeast, too far gone to realize he's past his prime, is that the color of it? You're calling in that life you saved on the beach."

She laughs, then, the first time you can ever remember hearing her laugh - for a servant of the Mirthful Messiahs, she is so serious, so stoic - and shakes her head. "No, no, you headache," she says. You'd nearly forgotten that you once called yourself that, that you'd called yourself that because she'd called you that first. "This time, I'm just a messenger. A harbinger, maybe."

"A distraction," you accuse.

"Hardly," she says, picking up her cup of coffee, or whatever passes for coffee among these aliens. She takes a careful sip; you glance discontentedly at your own cup but do not reach for it. "Meteoric bombardment of Alternia has been ongoing for hours. Any minute now, one will fatally wound the Carbuncle of the Deep, and her death throes will take most of the species with her."

After a long pause - even with the content of her words, you cannot seem to muster any great sense of urgency - you sigh, and ask, "Why tell me any of this, Handmaid?"

The Handmaid closes her eyes briefly, and the faint flickers of color drain from her skin; when she opens her eyes, they are gold and garnet and impossibly, impossibly tired. "I wanted to say goodbye," she admits. "I don't have friends. You're the closest thing to a colleague I have."

You chuckle a little, despite yourself, suddenly put in mind of some comedy television show you'd deigned to take notice of for a few episodes before losing interest. "Work proximity associates," you supply, and laugh when she gives you a thoroughly annoyed look.

"If you must," she concedes.

It's funny, really, how ready you are to believe her. Maybe it's her tone and her manner; maybe, you've simply reached the point where you're ready to stop living, but too proud to die by anything but divine fiat. It's about the only thing that hasn't tried and failed to kill you yet, after all. So you pick up the cup, outrageously small in your broad hand, and offer a half-mocking toast. "I'll be seeing you among the tents of the Grand Carnival, then, sister."

"I think that's probably a lie, too," she points out, and the uncanny lights start to shimmer over her skin and through her eyes again.

And before you can answer, the psychic scream starts to build between your ears and between your horns and behind your eyes, the Vast Glub. And you laugh through the pain, and you throw back the cup of coffee, bitter and sweet and not nearly enough to overcome the phantom taste of brine and bile, and -

You die.

And the Handmaid of Death, the Demoness, finishes her coffee, and stands, and wanders off into the chaos of dead trolls and rioting natives, and flickers off into time.


End file.
